1. Applicable Field
The field of the present invention relates generally to systems and methods for communicating with businesses, organizations or other entities.
2. Related Art
People may seek to personally communicate with businesses, organizations or other entities for various reasons. A person may wish, for example, to provide feedback, address customer service issues, make reservations, inquire about products or services, or find information not available through other methods. There are many communication options available, for example, calling or sending an email to a local business, calling or sending an email to a corporate office or initiating a web chat on the entity's website.
Typically the person performs a search using a search engine in an attempt to initiate communication with the entity. The person is searching for an implicit or explicit token, such as a phone number, an email address, or a Web contact form, that can be used to initiate communication with the entity. These tokens for any type of entity can be found on the entity's Web page (typically by following a “Contact” link). These tokens can also be found on place pages (specific type of Web page that describes a specific addressable geographic location), or using various service websites (review websites) or applications.
Numerous strategies have been used in the information retrieval field to improve search results by determining the most relevant search results for a user's query from the millions or billions of possible results. Most of these strategies involve ranking of Web pages based on their popularity and relevancy. In addition, results are often optimized based on updated content, cross-referencing of inbound and outbound links, meta tags and website description, as well as, Search Engine Marketing (selling of keywords by the search engines).